PagerDuty, the leader in digital operations management, today announced a significant new set of capabilities designed around the major incident resolution lifecycle, to help organizations evolve the digital operations of their business. Encompassing the full lifecycle from event management through incident response and learning, the new product workflows enable developers, IT and business teams to boost their operational maturity, resulting in improved productivity, faster time to resolution, more time for innovation and higher quality experiences for their customers. PagerDuty’s modern incident resolution lifecycle now includes: PagerDuty Postmortems, Incident Priority and Custom Incident Actions, among other new capabilities.

Why is a modern incident resolution lifecycle a requirement for today’s digital operations? As new technologies and digital delivery methods give consumers unprecedented choice, organizations too must focus on flawless customer experience and continuous innovation to protect revenue, maximize competitiveness and drive productivity. According to the PagerDuty State of Digital Operations Report, although 84 percent of IT survey respondents felt confident that their organization is prepared to support digital services, almost 60 percent of those who identified as prepared to support digital services are still experiencing customer-impacting incidents (slowness or downtime) at least once a week. The increased complexity and associated cognitive load, surge in the number of tools and growing difficulty in capacity planning stand out as top operations challenges, starkly illustrating the need for DevOps best practices that accelerate the operational maturity of IT organizations. Companies that want to maximize their customers’ experience and use digital services as a competitive advantage must constantly innovate. Keeping up with this rapid pace of change requires digital operations that integrate people, processes and tools to quickly identify and resolve incidents and continuously improve to minimize future impact.

“The way organizations detect, respond to, resolve, learn from and prevent operational issues is paramount to customer and business success in today’s instant gratification world. Organizations must embrace an integrated approach to automated detection, event management and incident resolution to increase not only customer value and trust, but also employee engagement, visibility, learning and productivity,” said Jennifer Tejada, Chief Executive Officer, PagerDuty. “With PagerDuty’s new Incident Resolution Management solutions that automate much of the modern incident resolution lifecycle, IT leaders and DevOps teams are empowered to proactively address and prevent unexpected, customer-impacting issues faster across applications, services and networks with new and traditional architectures and data models. These solutions are central to achieving the innovation velocity essential to being competitive in the digital world.”

PagerDuty’s new major incident resolution lifecycle spans event management features, incident prioritization, postmortem tools, and more, empowering organizations to:

  • Drive faster resolution with the right context and powerful automation. Teams can now simplify and automate the incident resolution lifecycle by seamlessly integrating event management at scale and incident response workflows, removing the burdens of administrative mechanics. With the new Incident Priority feature it is easy to classify major incidents which require a more highly specialized and coordinated response process. And when any type of issue occurs, Custom Incident Actions provide rich in-app extensibility to streamline resolution by automating desired tasks or remediations directly within the incident.
  • Accelerate learning to be prepared for the next problem. Best-in-class incident management process calls for a postmortem for every major incident. With PagerDuty Postmortems, IT teams can now gain a better understanding of how to prevent future incidents by streamlining and automating the postmortem process, institutionalizing a learning culture to improve both systems and every stage of the incident resolution.
  • Maximize individual effectiveness while ensuring consistency with existing processes. With first-class extensibility to other tools used by the enterprise, PagerDuty drives automatable processes built on DevOps best practices that allow IT teams to focus on higher value parts of incident response. Among other capabilities, the new Atlassian JIRA Software extension and updated ServiceNow integration help customers centralize information without limiting how people work, breaking down silos between processes and data.

“Incident postmortems are highly valuable exercises for spotting areas where an operation can improve, as well as highlight team successes,” said Len Mitchell, Systems Analyst, Expedia. “However, the process of building the documentation for a postmortem can be time consuming. The postmortem tool in PagerDuty allows me to complete that process in a fraction of the time. I can easily pull in notes, subscriber notifications, Slack chat threads, and alerts into the interface to build my timeline, and then lead my team through identifying root cause, what we did well, what we need to work on, and then create action items. Along with the rest of the functionality in PagerDuty, I have a complete suite of tools for effective incident management.”